Every man has a story, this is my story.

The ever-wonderful Jes is in the market for a new DSLR! She sold her entry level Canon DSLR and is ready to move up to the heavy-hitting power of a Nikon D90 (or similar). So Many Choices! Anytime a friend is considering a new camera purchase, it always gets me thinking about the different DSLR systems. Here is are just a few: Canon (full frame, non-full frame), Nikon (FX, DX), Sony (full frame, non-full frame), Olympus (four thirds, micro four

I’ve been working on the search feature of komparison. Specifically, making sure multi-word searches like peanut butter crackers work well. Let’s say we have some a food item stored as Crackers, wheat, sandwich, with peanut butter filling and the user searches for peanut butter crackers. If the search is coded simplistically like: SELECT * FROM some_table WHERE some_field LIKE ‘%peanut butter crackers%’ or: SELECT * FROM some_table WHERE some_field LIKE ‘%peanut%butter%crackers%’ Then we won’t get any results because the ordering

How long does it take to build a RAID5 array on a Thecus N4100Pro NAS using four 1TB drives? About 10 hours and 30 minutes. This was with (4) Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB hard drives, 32 MB Cache, 7200 RPM SATA II (WD1001FALS). I am a big fan of Thecus products! They have been very reliable for me and my family :-).

2009.09.04 updated with URLs for equipment (see bottom of post) Since we’ve been married, Samantha and I have lived off the grid. We don’t have any utility bills and we haven’t had a single power outage. However, today (September 3rd, 2000) still marks a big day for us in our off the grid living. Because today we connected our new batteries and solar setup to our house. We now have over 30x the electrical storage capacity! Energy during the day

Small tripods (some tiny, some tabletop, some misc.) I’ve been looking for a great travel tripod to use with my Olympus E-P1. So far I haven’t found the perfect match. However, I have found some cool tripod stuff… Sweet looking Leica tripod: Turn a tripod into a laptop/notebook desk: “Table top” tripods One of my favorites: Amazon.com: Manfrotto 709B Digi Table Top Tripod with Ball Head Also cool and functional, will probably support quite a bit of weight: Amazon.com: Cullmann

It’s that time of year again. Time to reinstall Windows after my laptop has finally succumbed to the mass of programs I’ve installed or evaluated. It’s getting slow, not painfully slow, but slow enough that I crave a clean install. Currently the laptop has Vista on it. Rather than paying for a Windows 7 upgrade, I’m considering “downgrading” to Windows XP. I would have done that a long time ago, as I am not a Vista fan… but at the

[photos for this entry to follow later] I didn’t bring a strap with me for the E-P1 on our two week Colorado trip. That meant I either: (a) carried the camera handheld (b) kept the camera in my backpack, a Lowepro CompuDaypack (<$40 new on eBay) which has a quick access compartment for the camera (c) kept the camera in a pocket of my cargo shorts (not many DSLR like cameras can fit in a pocket!) All three worked fairly

We’re back from our Colorado vacation and WOW, everything is amazingly green here in Missouri! For August, this is the most lush I ever remember seeing the vegetation. There must have been some serious rains while we were gone. The following photo is meant to show the almost jungle like state of the forest around here ;-). Hopefully we will have a lot of black walnuts this year! The pine trees I planted, which are about three years old, grew

J.D. is an attorney and IT professional living off the grid. He has been a tech enthusiast ever since his dad let him play with computers in the early 80s. Now jdhodges.com is where he shares tech tips. Thanks for visiting & feel free to join in the discussion by commenting :-)